We’re finishing the list.

Last week in Episode 255, I shared the first five things I know for certain about building a business, not from a course or a certification, but from almost 10 years of trying things, adjusting, failing, pivoting, and occasionally karaoke-ing in front of 200 women at a conference. (That’s still in the show notes if you missed it.)

Today we’re closing out the list with lessons six through ten. And I’ll be honest: these are the ones that feel the most personal. Because they’re the ones that required the most internal work to learn.

Lesson 6: Finances Can Be Simple

I want to introduce you to two women who fundamentally changed how I think about money, because before them, my relationship with finances was… not great.

In 2019 I booked a VIP day with Sheila Hansen, a CPA from Nebraska I’d connected with on Instagram. I showed up expecting QuickBooks tutorials and a budget spreadsheet. What I got instead was a couple of hours on money mindset, and I will be honest, I rolled my eyes at the agenda a little bit.

I was wrong. Those hours are what I still carry with me today.

Sheila helped me build a money mantra, a phrase to reach for in the moments when the old scarcity thoughts crept in. The one that stuck: money flows like water. And much like a river, it never stops moving.

Before that day, I thought about money as something to grab and hold onto. When it left (and it always leaves, that’s how money works), I felt angry and ashamed and like I’d done something wrong. What Sheila helped me see is that trying to white-knuckle money is part of why it felt like it slipped through my fingers. If I treated money like a welcome guest, gave it a job while it was here, let it move freely in and out, the whole energy around it shifted.

She also gave me a second mantra: God provides. And in the moments when a client cancels or an unexpected bill lands, I come back to that. Something else is coming. It always does.

Now, I want to be clear: the money mantra didn’t fix everything. Those were deep-seated beliefs and patterns, and it took years of working through them, eventually with Sheila as my bookkeeper and CPA, to really restructure how I operated.

The second game-changer was Gina Knox and her Small Business Money School. Gina teaches a money waterfall system using three bank accounts: a business checking account for all income and expenses, a business savings account, and a tax savings account. All your revenue lands in checking. You know your buffer number (the minimum you need in there for everything to run smoothly). Anything above that goes into tax savings first, then the rest into business savings.

That’s it. No complicated formulas. No spreadsheet I had to maintain perfectly. Just a clear flow with a job for every dollar.

I saved more in the first few months of that system than I had in the previous year. But more than the savings number, I moved differently. When you have a cushion, when you know an unexpected expense won’t derail you, you make decisions from a completely different place. You take risks you wouldn’t have taken before. You show up with a different kind of confidence.

If you get hives opening your banking app, or if Christmas expenses give you a pit in your stomach, finances can be simpler than you think. Both Sheila and Gina have been guests on this podcast. Go find their episodes and look them up.

Lesson 7: You Will Not Realize Your Goals Entirely on Your Own

I started my business wanting to stay lean. Do it myself. Not need anybody.

This is very on-brand for an Enneagram 3. We are the high achievers who say “I got it” while quietly drowning. I know this about myself now. In 2016, I thought it was a strength.

What I figured out pretty quickly is that the things I was best at… I was best at them. And the things I wasn’t built for were dragging everything else down. When I started this podcast, I knew that if it lived and died by my ability to edit, upload, market, and produce it entirely on my own, it would never get out the door consistently.

My friend Miranda asked if she could support me. She’s been editing this show ever since, and she is the reason it sounds as good as it does. She catches the weird breaths. She pulls the best clips. She handles the execution so I can handle the concept and the recording and the marketing.

That’s what it looks like when two people work to their strengths for the sake of a shared thing.

Your version of this might be a contractor you bring in for a specific project. A business bestie you meet for coffee monthly to celebrate wins and talk through struggles. A conference that refills the tank when your motivation dips. The people you welcome into your journey are the ones who keep you going when conviction wavers.

You don’t have to do this alone. And honestly, the end product is better when you don’t.

Lesson 8: You Will Grow Faster and Go Further With a Coach

This is related to lesson seven, but it deserves its own section because the impact has been significant enough that I can’t put it in a bullet point.

In December 2025, I reached out to Katrina Klooster (Episode 252 if you haven’t heard that one yet) because I was stepping into a managing director role at The Restoration Project and I saw gaps. Gaps in my confidence. Gaps in how I was communicating vision to a team. I wanted to work on those things specifically.

What I couldn’t have known is that within a few months, I’d be navigating a full career pivot, deciding whether to stay with TRP in its new form or return to Molly Knuth Media. And Katrina was there for all of it, asking the questions I was too close to the situation to ask myself. What do you actually want? What does success look like five years from now? When you picture your ideal day, what’s in it?

That “what do you want” question is a bugger, by the way. It trips me up every single time. But it is the right question, and having someone ask it of you with patience and genuine curiosity is different than trying to answer it alone at your kitchen table.

The person I am today compared to December 2025 Molly is genuinely different. More clear. More grounded. More willing to go slowly and think things through rather than sprint toward the next idea. Katrina is a big part of that.

I also want to mention my friend Jill Carr, a podcasting consultant I brought in to help me think through the future of this show. I had seventeen ideas (classic Molly) and no clarity on which ones actually made sense. Jill helped me see that the title didn’t need to change, get clear on who I’m talking to, identify content buckets worth building around, and think about how to frame each episode in a way that serves you better.

One conversation with an expert saved me months of trial and error.

A coach, a mentor, a consultant in their field: whoever that person is for you, the investment will pay back in time saved, mistakes avoided, and clarity gained. I believe it completely.

Lesson 9: You Are Allowed to Change Your Mind

Stay with me here, because I think this one gets misread.

There’s a message circulating right now that says if you say you’re going to do something and then decide not to, you’ve failed. You’ve let yourself down. You’ve let the internet down. And I want to push back on that pretty firmly.

You are a human person. You are allowed to change your mind.

In 2016, I wanted to build a marketing agency. Multiple departments. A team. A downtown storefront on Main Street of my small town. I said it publicly. I committed to it. I bought the building.

And then I lived it for a while, and I realized: this is not what I thought I was signing up for. It required a level of leadership I wasn’t equipped to bring. It required financial commitments I hadn’t fully thought through. It was asking more of me than I had capacity for.

So I changed my mind. I sold the storefront. I scaled the team back to just me and a couple of contractors. I redirected.

And I’m still here.

Coca-Cola had Surge. It was everywhere for a couple of years and then quietly disappeared. PepsiCo had Sierra Mist and renamed it Starry. Iconic brands redirect their resources all the time. They don’t issue apologies for it. They just make the call that serves their business best and keep going.

You built this thing. You get to decide what it looks like. The business you started does not have to be the business you finish with, and choosing differently is not the same as failing.

Lesson 10: This Is Personal Development First, Professional Endeavor Second

This is the one I keep coming back to. The one I believe most deeply after everything.

The 2016 version of me was a new mom to baby number four who thought she might go back to teaching eventually and definitely didn’t think she had what it took to run a business, because she didn’t have a business degree, wasn’t certified in anything, and didn’t see her natural abilities as abilities at all.

Time management? That was just how I functioned. Rallying people around an idea? Didn’t everyone do that? Breaking down complex topics into something actionable? That was just… talking.

It took me almost ten years to see those things as skills. Real, valuable, not-everyone-has-them skills. And it took excavating a lot of old beliefs to get there, beliefs about what I was worth, what I was capable of, what I was allowed to want.

That excavation is the work. Not the LLC filing. Not the pricing page. Not the content calendar. The inner work is what makes the outer work possible. You cannot build something sustainable on a foundation of self-doubt and scarcity and “I don’t really have anything special to offer.” You just can’t.

The founder’s journey asks you to grow. It puts you in rooms you didn’t expect, in front of problems you haven’t solved before, in conversations that require you to know what you think and say it clearly. Every single one of those moments is a development opportunity as much as it is a business moment.

Business building changes you. I am so different from the person who started this ten years ago. And I’m still a long way from the person I want to be in another ten. That’s not a problem. That’s the point.

Personal development first. Professional endeavor second. In that order, always.

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Those are all ten. I hope somewhere in this two-part series something landed for you, something you can carry into your own founder’s journey and use to get there a little faster, with a few fewer hard-won scars than I have.

If something resonated, I’d genuinely love to hear it. Find me on Instagram @mollyknuth or send me an email at molly@mollyknuthmedia.com.

And if you know a founder who needs this, send them Episodes 255 and 256. That’s what this show is for.